My Music Staff Reviews

How can I possibly choose just one thing? Before My Music Staff, keeping track of missed lessons was next to impossible. I had separate notebooks and online files and word docs for attendance, lesson notes, expenses, payments for books and payments for lessons - now it's all together - neat and tidy, organised and at my fingertips (and my teachers') at the studio, at home and on the go! And that's just the beginning...

I do wish My Music Staff was setup to take Electronic Funds Transfers in Canada - as that is a new form of payment I am implementing in my school. I also would like to be able to add my business logo as a header for emails with an automatic signature. I realise I can use placeholders to do this job but it is a little laborious when you're in a rush.

It makes scheduling and keeping track of payments a breeze. Everything is all in one place and generating reports is also simple. For the most part, it does more than I had expected/hoped.

For people who prefer having support via the phone, this is not a good option. There are many times that I wish I could just dial a number to get an answer. That being said, they respond quickly via email. There is also a learning curve with this software that might be a barrier to some.

I like the amount of customisation. The calendar Sync. The website functionality and the Families & Invoicing section.

It is not user friendly for the public. It is far too complicated for my business. For example if someone wants to sign up for a course they have to go through Student Portals. Log In. Emails. Setting it up. Saving it to the Homepage. Then they cant pay immediately they have to wait for an invoice and then log in again and finally enter their bank details. I am im discussions of discontinuing with this software. While it has great benefits for Admin it really is too complicated for the public and inviting new customers in. Therefore it is not for us in the long term.

It has features that I didn’t realise I would need. It’s the best blends of resources for music teachers and management software.

The experience on phones feels clunky and difficult to navigate. All my staff use it on their phones and would prefer an app that is more condensed for just their day of teaching.

It does everything I need it to do in terms of scheduling, billing and expenses and has other features that I use sometimes such as lesson notes, file sharing, newsletters and lending library. It also has a website included, blog and online signup.

It would be good if students were able to edit/comment on their lesson notes. Also if there could be a blog or newsletter that is not public but only accessible by your clients with the ability for them to comment.

I have been using My Music Staff for a couple of months now. My favorite feature is the auto billing from the calendar. Students can change times or cancel lessons themselves which eliminates a lot of the administrative work. I love that I can email students or parents or both seamlessly. I use the online resources feature to upload audio or video customized for each student. It's easy to email notes to parents or students and also maintain private notes for myself. I also like that there is an easy check box for when students pay at the lesson. Just check the box, no need to enter a payment. I like the setting that a cancelled lesson automatically creates an open 'makeup' spot in my schedule that ask students can see and claim.

I offer tiered pricing for families. So the first student in a family is full priced, the 2nd is discounted, and the 3rd is more discounted than the 2nd. There isn't a good way to do that on this site. I can assign different prices per student, but if the 'first' child in the family cancels, but child 2 and 3 still do lessons, I have to manually adjust the price. I also don't like that the invoicing shows a balance owed all month long, although it does adjust as needed. For example, my students pay at the end of the month. But on the first of the month, it shows that they owe for the full month. They won't get an invoice until the end of the month, But if they (or I) check their account before then, I would prefer to see a current balance for lessons taken, not lessons taken and scheduled.

First of all, the price is fantastic for a small business - you pay per teacher you're managing and the base subscription price is outstanding! Any equivalent scheduling software charges as though you are a large company and was many times the price for just me and my partner!

The scheduling interface is easy and pretty intuitive, and I love that I can opt to allow people to change their own times (but only to a time that I've already set aside for teaching). I continue to have control over the times and days that I teach, and I have to deal with fewer make up lesson headaches!

I've only started using some of the other functions this school year (file sharing, practice tracking, sending notes to parents/students, etc) so only a few months, but so far it's working really well and I love being able to contact the parents with concerns or suggestions when the child is not present.

1. Most of my students pay on an automated monthly tuition model, and I would love to be able to set the month beginning/end dates for something other than the 1st. (mid month starts, 2nd pay period, etc)
2. While it is great to be able to message parents with notes, notifications of uploads, etc, it would be great if there were a way to group all those messages together instead of spamming them the day after the lesson.
3. Sometimes changes I make from my mobile device don't save properly (attendance is bad for this)

I discovered MMS when covid hit. It has been a god send. The monthly fee is more than saved in the time I save and what I offer to my pupils. The calendar means I can check my day at a glance despite several teaching venues which I can colour differently. Billing pupils is so easy and keeping track of their accounts is a doddle as MMS does it all for me. I log notes during the lesson which I send to parents or pupils, or both, at the end of the lesson by clicking a box. When it comes to the end of the tax year, I press a couple of buttons and there is my income and expenditure. I appear more professional to my customers and my working life is more streamlined and efficient.

Very minor gripes like being limited as to the email I can send with an invoice. I like to customise the invoice email based on school or private teaching. Whilst I can do this by changing the invoice or invoice reminder default emails, I can’t use any others so have to change the emails repeatedly by the time I invoice everyone.

Hard to choose! I depend on so many facets of MyMusicStaff every day. Perhaps Scheduling is the best aspect, but Accounting is near the top. The calendar is super easy for ongoing daily lesson scheduling and is accessible to parents for canceling and rescheduling, with no attention from me required. I even schedule available make-up slots and parents make us of them.
Accounting is a huge time-saver! Every detail is there and doesn't take much time to comprehend. Ongoing lesson rates, special rates for certain families, automatic or nonautomatic billing, make-up credits--they really know what a music teacher needs!

Not much of a minus, but I'd like a little more flexibility with attendance reports. But I have worked out a way to get what I need.

I like that it is an all-in-one product. In my other business, I had to have five different products to manage everything. I also enjoy that you can see the balances owed right on the home screen so that I don't have to go looking for it or forget about it when student shows up.

I wish that when you open to take attendance on a lesson that the notes of the lesson and the attendance/payment were in a horizontal space instead of vertical, so you could see it all at once, then the previous lesson notes could be in a row beneath it. The calendar could resize too to fit the screen so we don't have to scroll through the whole thing. More opportunities to try the features. There are so many features and I have no idea how to use them or even get started. I've tried looking up tutorials, but they're very generic and not sure how to fit them to my studio. It's also hard to get students to practice. On the student side, could there be an opportunity to motivate kids to practice? Like... for every 10 mins they practice they get points and they can build those up at their studio for a prize (presented by the teacher?) Or even do more of a community thing where the whole studio group of students works to get 1 big prize for the studio from MMS?

Very user friendly for both parents and employees (we are a multi teacher school)
Love how responsive the MMS team is, both with constant updates to the program (and often based on client requests) to attentive support when there are issues.
Price point can't compare to some of the alternatives. I love that it is based on the number of teachers, so doesn't penalize us for getting more students (ie. being a successful business!) like a per/student rate.

It has a lot of functionality with reports that is not so intuitive. Accessing the data in ways that may be useful to a business can often mean trying lots of different reports and tweaking the settings slightly to get the right report.
We accept payments in studio via Payd and have to enter these manually into MMS. Would love some way to connect these, or to be able to accept canadian debit cards (require chip readers).

The ease of use to link with pupils.
With the ability to create lessons notes as you teach and email them for assistance with practice is a great benefit for both teacher and pupil.
The Lesson reminders.
the lesson reminder have a two fold benefit in that they reduce the number of no shows for lessons and ensure that pupils remember to let you know if they cannot attend to allow you the scope to offer other lessons to them and to fill their slot; it also gets a lot of correspondence to you in advance of the lesson so that you can have other material ready for the lesson in advance.
Invoicing.
This has proven to be a very reliable package for invoicing.
Student records.
A very easy way of keeping all notes up to date and to hand.
Library facility
I haven't had much call to use this yet but on the occasion that I have lent music out it is an invaluable way of keeping track of who has what.
Blog
This is an area that is looking to be exploited later in the year.

I have not really found any down sides to the software.

This platform offers a wide range of features that cater to all my teaching and student organization needs in one place. I particularly appreciate the calendar, attendance, and invoicing system, which have significantly automated my manual processes, saving me a considerable amount of time.There are lots of features which cover all of my needs for teaching and organising students in one place, I like the calendar feature, attendance, and invoicing system which really automated a lot of my manual processes and saves lots of time.

It would be beneficial to update the appearance of the platform and have a corresponding mobile application. Additionally, adding more features to the calendar, such as the ability for parents to switch lesson times with other parents, would be useful. It would also be helpful to have features that allow me to monitor my students' progress, reward positive behavior, and discipline negative behavior. Currently, I am using Class Dojo for this purpose, but integrating these features into My Music Staff would be ideal since Class Dojo is not directed for use by music teachers.

MMS is overall very easy to use, has an attractive, well-thought through design, and is very reliable. I use it for registering new students, tracking attendance, billing and receiving payments. The customer service team are responsive, honest, open to suggestions and overall simply very helpful. I use it every day, it is the core software of my business, and it has significantly reduced my admin work.

Just a couple of minor niggles. I’d like the lesson notes to copy through automatically to a student’s next lesson; usually they do this, but they don’t if it’s not a repeating lesson. It’s not a big deal. I don’t love the Milage function, which is a bit unwieldy to use.

The things I like most about MyMusicStaff are:
- The ability for me to send professional-looking invoices to all of my students, ensuring that everyone pays me the correct amount and streamlining my billing process
- The ability for students to reschedule their own lessons in the Student Portal
- The ability to manage my schedule, leave lesson notes, track progress, handle billing, and use the practice timer all in one place

It takes a lot of time to manage on a daily basis, and sometimes it takes me several clicks to get where I need to go. For example, when navigating to the student view to view my Studio News posts, I have to...

1. Click on the 'Students' tab on the left
2. Click on one of my students' names
3. Navigate all the way to the right to where it says 'Student Portal'
4. Click on 'View As Student'
5. Wait for the student view to load
6. Click on the 'News and Blog Posts' bar

And finally, see what I wanted to see.

The email interface for writing emails within MMS is also a little bit weird.

The user interface gets better and better all the time, though, and the staff is very good at responding to suggestions!

My Music Staff is intuitive and easy to use. I came over from a competitor's software, and the difference is night and day. I was constantly encountering glitches and needing support with the other product, but with My Music Staff I have needed support only one time in almost a year. Customer service was incredibly responsive, friendly, and resolved my issue right away. The interface and functionality are very smooth with My Music Staff. I highly recommend this software to anyone who teaches music, regardless of the size of your studio. My Music Staff will streamline your processes and make your life so much easier!

At first I was disappointed that they don't have a dedicated app. But the mobile optimized (responsive design) website works extremely well on my Android phone, and since I am already familiar with the website it is very easy to navigate and syncs seamlessly. So I really can't point to any cons; my experience has been entirely positive so far.